Adults now constitute the majority of students in higher education; what they bring to it, want and need are important questions in the development of a more responsive higher education. The author discusses the relationship between motives, education, and life history to explore how culture and history shape people and their motives for learning, taking into account variations in gender, social background and ethnicity, challenging the orthodox view that non-traditional students enter higher educational for vocational/material reasons.

Adults now constitute the majority of students in higher education; what they bring to it, want and need are important questions in the development of a more responsive higher education. The author discusses the relationship between motives, education, and life history to explore how culture and history shape people and their motives for learning, taking into account variations in gender, social background and ethnicity, challenging the orthodox view that non-traditional students enter higher educational for vocational/material reasons.

Using Biographical Methods in Social Research provides an informative, comprehensive, accessible and practical guide to the nature and use of biographical methods, combining a consideration of theoretical issues with practical guidance. Barbara Merrill and Linden West consider important questions about what research is for, what makes it valid, to the practical business of interviewing, analyzing and writing up of biographical data. The authors draw on their sociological and psychological orientations to provide a truly interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and provide numerous examples...

This title explores the current educational system from a psychodynamic perspective. The papers collected here cover a broad range of topics, from papers on the results of research with art students with a history of mental health problems, using the techniques of Donald Winnicott with adults; self-respect, self-confidence and self-esteem: psychoanalytic and philosophical implications for higher education; learning through ourselves: the supervision group as a training tool; to the research findings of a primary school teacher working with a little girl in her class. This book will be found...

In this volume, academics and researchers across disciplines including education, psychology and health studies come together to discuss personal, political and professional narratives of struggle, resilience and hope. Contributors draw from a rich body of auto/biographical research to examine the role of narrative and how it can be constructed to compose a life story, considering the roles of significant others, inspirational, educational and fictional characters, and those in myth and legend.

The book discusses how personal narrative, often neglected in social and psychological...